Exciting developments around here. For one, we had our old, hail-beaten roof replaced, and not only does the new roof completely freshen up our home, but the workers took great care not to damage the garden in the process. If you’re in the Austin area and need a new roof, I highly recommend Straight Solutions.

For a comparison, here’s our old, sad roof, with a poor patch job around the porch gable that we added. And now back up — ahh. If anyone’s wondering, we went with composite shingles for cost reasons, and the color is Tamko’s Weathered Wood.

Below the steep roof, plants are looking good — zero damage from the re-roofing. I sure would like to see some rain in that dry creek though. We’ve had a rainless autumn.

It’s called “Sway Your HOA,” and it’s about how to persuade your old-school HOA to permit sustainable landscaping practices like reducing lawn and planting native plants. If you subscribe — and you should (you get the magazine by becoming a member of the Wildflower Center) — look for it on page 42.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
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Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin next May 3-6, 2018! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

While touring the Cornerstone Sonoma gardens in Sonoma, California, a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed a two-fer. Sunset’s Test Gardens relocated to Cornerstone in 2016, and after a year of growth they’re already looking amazing. A glowing vertical garden of sempervivums, planted in the orange Sunset logo, greets you as you enter.

Sunset’s new gardens at Cornerstone were designed by Homestead Design Collective, whose co-founder Stefani Bittner is a fellow Ten Speed Press author. She’s co-author of The Beautiful Edible Garden, a terrific book about designing edible gardens that not only taste good but look good year-round.

The Sunset gardens consist of 5 distinct spaces: Flower Room, Farm, Cocktail Garden, Gathering Space, and Backyard Orchard. I explored the Farm garden first, drawn in along a basil-lined path through round trellis arbors by TerraTrellis. A wood-framed greenhouse stands at the end of the path, with meadowy plants visible through its glass walls.

Inside, a few simple pots of succulents adorn the airy space.

Along the path, sour gherkins dangle enticingly from one trellis.

A double axis means that when you look back, you enjoy an enticing view that way as well. This way the path leads to…

…the ready-for-lounging Cocktail Garden: “In this drinkable garden, everything growing can be mixed, muddled, or blended into tasty libations. Culinary bay, pineapple guava, pomegranates, and lavender make the foundation plantings, and a hop vine (whose dried flowers add the bitter note to beer) makes a beautiful, robust trellis climber. Potted specialty citrus and mints show our readers who are short on space that they can still grow a bounty in containers.”

‘White Swan’ echinacea and tall verbena. The grass looks like bamboo muhly, but I’m not sure.

A burgundy-leaved crepe myrtle stands out against bright greens and yellows.

A classic and crowd-pleasing combo of purple coneflower and tall verbena.

A serpentine decomposed-granite path leads through the flowers and grasses to the Backyard Orchard garden, where a beautiful galvanized-wire sculpture of a tree makes a striking and appropriate focal point.

Tree of Life, the creation of New Zealand sculptor Regan Gentry, represents a California chestnut and was originally the centerpiece of a Cornerstone garden called Ecology of Place.

When that garden was removed to make way for the new Sunset gardens, the sculpture was left in place, glinting in the sunlight above verbena and surrounded by the orchard’s new fruit trees.

There’s a sense of movement in those swirling silver wires.

Next is an easy-care foliage garden in Gathering Space, “an updated take on an outdoor living room, inspiring us to move the party outside.”

This looks like a distinctively California garden to my eyes: upscale picnic table on a golden decomposed-granite patio, olive trees, and silvery and chartreuse low-water plants. ‘Platinum Beauty’ lomandra (I’m planning to trial this one soon!) edges the bed behind the picnic table. I think that’s ‘Beyond Blue’ fescue around the olive tree.

I wonder if this could possibly hold up in our climate. Our unrelenting hothouse summer is often the deal-breaker for those dry-loving and high-country plants I covet.

This, however, could be an autumn scene in Austin: Gulf muhly in flower with purple coneflower and tall verbena. Beautiful! We won’t see flowering like this in Austin for at least another month, starting in early October, so it was a treat to enjoy it in August.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
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Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Get on the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks. Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by talented designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

Digging has been a little quiet for the past week because I was away at the Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling, touring public and private gardens in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and northern Virginia. But on the home front, I’ve been interviewed by writers at two local magazines, both of which are on newsstands now.

And in the July/August 2017 issue of Texas Gardener, I’m interviewed about one of my favorite turf alternatives — sedge (Carex).

Titled “Tired of Turf? Try Sedge Instead,” the article suggests planting sedge in place of a thirsty, chemical-dependent lawn. Regular readers may recognize my photo of my front-yard sedge “lawn.” My thanks to writer Suzanne Labry for interviewing me and mentioning my book Lawn Gone!. By the way, this article is currently available online.

It’s the garden of Margie McClurg, designed by Jackson Broussard of Sprout, and it’s a real beauty!

If you’re an Austin-area reader, you should be able to pick up all three magazines right now at local newsstands, including at Barnes & Noble, where I saw them today. Readers throughout Texas can find Texas Gardener, and throughout the South you can find Southern Living. And if you don’t already subscribe, you should to support local gardening coverage.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Get on the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks. Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by talented designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

Hello! I'm Pam Penick, a dirt-under-my-nails, hoping-for-rain, spiky-plant lover gardening under the Death Star in Austin, Texas (zone 8b). Here's where I share all the gardening goodness I can dig up, not just in Austin but wherever I go. Want to know more? Read Meet Pam and My Gardens. Or drop me a line to say hello.